Blackdust.

BLACKDUST.

Darkness,

Black.

Unyielding.

Look around,

What do you see?

No floodlights

To save you this time

As you put your hand

Out over the edge of

The cliff; no candles

To burn the letters from me

You wish to hide.

No mist to

Lose yourself in,

Vanish, with a

Flourish of your cape, from

Time.

There is nothing

You can lean on,

Nothing to

Set you free;

No clouds to scream at,

No storms but 

The one within yourself, are you

Sure you will not listen

To me?  I will tell you tales

Of a land not far away from

Here, that you will go to one day—so

Keep walking, even if there are

No floodlights

To save you this time

No candles 

To burn my letters

No mist

To hide away in;

A land where you can wish

For the orange sunrise and you will see it,

You can wish for yellow cornfields and 

Run past them 

You can build your own

House in the sunlight,

You can rub your eyes in the morning, and say,

“I have arrived,”

Go on, my friend, there are

Many doors you have not yet opened,

Many people you have not met,

Many things you have not seen;

There is far more to life, far more to

Believing

Than this moment in Time when you

Want to run away

From this smoke in the air that you

Would rather not breathe,

You must lead—for only

Then I will follow you

Out of the dust and 

Into space; finally

We will be free.

~Vruta Gupte (2016).

Nostalgia.

As we walk along the path

That is Life

Our roads may diverge

Yours may be bright and sunny

With meadows green and silent, peaceful

Mine may be full of colour, a forest, and falling rain

And even if sometimes your way seems

Filled with potholes and snakes and wetlands;

And mine, with red fire burning, and all the trees gone,

Remember.

Remember that once we walked together, endured together,

Through soot and snow,

With cold water in our shoes;

You shook it out, I couldn’t

Remember.

A road fraught with perils, danger lurking

Around every bend,

You fought them, I didn’t.

And we went our own

Separate ways.

Someday when you look back

You will laugh at your past

Worrying self, you will

Wake up to the sunrise at the edge of

The earth, and you will look out into the distance, and say,

“What a wonderful day, o me, o Life!”

Remember,

We never know the places we’ll go

Until we reach them.

We never cross the rapids in rivers

Until we fight them.

We never bother to see

How good life is with our tiny, tiny problems

Until we see another, without.

You will look out into the distance,

And you will see a sillhouette.

By then you will have forgotten, but your heart will tell you--

I know her from somewhere.

First slowly, and then all at once, you will

Remember

The first snowfall, six feet high, us, trudging along

Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening,

Helping a squirrel

With her acorns before the icy winter,

Watching as the leaves on trees wither and die,

Wondering if we will, too;

Forgetting that spring and fall come after,

And all will be well

Once again, this time, forever.

I will be close enough, then, for you to

Look into my eyes

And see how much I missed you,

Walking beside you, laughing with you;

After years of searching for the perfect Life,

With cold gold in our pockets,

But none to share it with,

We find each other.

I will take your hand,

And lead you onward

To the beginning

Of a new adventure.


~Vruta Gupte (2016).

Carnival: Part Two

Hello everyone, this is the second part of the short story I'd started writing.  For Part One of Carnival, please click here.

Part Two



Robin chuckled to himself as he remembered his plan; he'd almost forgotten it for a few minutes there.  He'd left the painting in his studio in plain sight: heck, you could even see it from the roof of the Carnival Tower if you wanted to. Of course, she hadn't known that. She probably thought she'd stolen it.

He wondered if she herself would recognize the signs she kept talking about: signs someone is lying to you, signs someone is feeling uncomfortable, signs someone is in love with you--he smiled and grabbed her diary off of his desk, and turned to the last story.

It was called “Carnival".

Nice story--I've read it once, he thought, but I'd still like to read it again.  It was about two people, Jason and Rita, and each was madly in love with the other, but neither could work up the courage to share the way they felt.

Kind of like us, he thought--and corrected himself-- like me.  He still didn't know if she loved him.  He read on.

Rita was a writer, and Jason was a painter. Rita liked rainbows and starry nights and dreamed of falling in love one day (with one particular person), while Jason loved watching the sunsets, and generally busied himself with thoughts about weaving the things she liked into one of his own paintings: nothing too conspicuous, just a faint rainbow with daisies in the foreground, the sun still hiding behind the puffy white clouds.

They had met on a park bench on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and just when neither of them had felt the day could get any better, it did.  

And after that, of course, there was the usual exchange of phone numbers and the phone calls that went long into the starry nights, and secret meeting places, too.  The rocky patch near the creek in the forest was their favourite.  After Jason finished art school and Rita, her degree in English Literature, they would spend a large part of their days together, him painting, and her conjuring a story out of what she saw and believed.  



Robin sighed.  Jason and Rita--although they were characters in a story--had found happiness in each other, a kind of happiness he would, possibly, never find, and he didn't know if it--

That's it, he thought, and stopped himself.

To hell with this 'what if she doesn't love me' nonsense!  If she does, excellent, and if she doesn't, I can always move on.  No big deal.

He carefully placed the diary back on the table, wrote out a note for Laura, and grabbed his bike and sped off to the candy store.

*

(To be continued...)

Carnival: Part One

Part One

 

“If you have even one solitary light guiding you, remember, you are not alone in the tunnel of darkness. But even if you have no candles to light your path, look skyward, and rebehold the stars.  They will be your companions."

He remembered the words Laura had written in her little black book. 

Laura.

The girl with hair as dark as black coffee, who wore the same shirt every morning she opened the candy store at eight in the morning. 

Laura, with her beautiful stories and her pretty, sad smile.

“Believe in yourself!" the sea-blue coloured shirt read. A powerful message worn by a not-so-powerful woman.

But now, he had not seen her in a week. He wondered where she was--he missed her, and although they hadn't talked much, he had guessed everything about her, because of the little black book she'd left on the counter by mistake--or had it been intentional? As far as he knew from the book, Laura was not the kind of person who'd leave her things lying around, unless, of course, she had wanted someone to see them. Maybe she had left it for someone else? Mr. Marlon, perhaps?  The idea puzzled him. Mr. Marlon was reserved, unwilling to share his thoughts with even the closest of his acquaintances. Were Laura and Marlon friends of some sort? No, they couldn't be.

Could she have left it for a customer? He discarded the idea, it had too many variables.

She must have left it for him.

He shook his head, not wanting to distract himself from his painting of the end of a dark tunnel. He would have time to think about it later.

He looked around the room, feeling something was amiss, but maybe it was just because he'd been thinking of Laura.

                                                                       

   *

She sat on the hard, wooden chair she had got from the old lady across the street.  Stealing the painting had been easy--(what kind of artist keeps his studio unlocked when he's going to be outside for the whole day?)--the hard part was looking at it. She examined the masterpiece in her hands. Every stroke, every colour was perfect, just as she had imagined it. The snow, a grayish pearly white, the trees, bare, the sun, nonexistent within the painting, and her heart, broken.

No, he doesn't know about that.... Or does he? He could have found out from Mr. Marlon, for all she knew. 

But then he never talked to the old man except if he wanted him to pose for a portrait. Even then, the exchanges had been minimal.

The only question now was if he'd been clever enough to take her diary off the counter that day.

She noticed he had signed his name--Robin--in the corner of the painting, in black.

Every story she had ever written was about him, every last one. He was not mentioned in the most obvious of ways--by his name--but she had made sure all of them included things he liked-- the sunset, snow, children ice skating, shafts of sunlight cutting through the gaps in the leaves in autumn. She had been daring enough to make two of her characters, Jason and Rita--very similar to herself and Robin--fall in love.  That was the last story she'd written in the book.

She'd called it "Carnival".

To be continued....